crackle and hiss
by Crisium
Summary: The NCR emergency radio is for emergency use only. Mostly.


A/N: All credit for the idea goes to geekethefreak, who posted: "I love it when you become accepted by the NCR and a ranger gives you the emergency radio because I imagine the courier making calls for support for mundane things like opening pickle jars and such." And, ah. This happened.

* * *

><p>Mags had only been minding the desk for three hours before the new emergency radio crackled on. She hit the button, said, "This is Comm, what's your emergency?" and waited, pencil ready.<p>

Static crackled across the line like some idiot was wiping the receiver across an acre of corduroy, and a kid's voice ventured, "Uh. Is this the NCR?"

"Affirmative. What is your emergency?"

"—because the guy out by Novac gave me this radio—"

"Ma'am," cut in Mags, though _ma'am_ had to be a stretch by a good fifteen years, judging from the voice on the other end. "This is an emergency channel. Repeat: _what_ is your emergency?"

A long pause made the silence hiss, made the possibilities multiply in Mags' imagination. Fiends. The Legion on the move. Cazadores. "There's a dog outside my door?" came the nervous response at last. "And it won't go away."

Mags sat back, dumbfounded. "Is the dog hostile, ma'am?"

"No? But it smells really bad, and—"

Mags cut the call.

.. .. ..

Two days later the radio crackled again. "Don't hang up," said the kid as soon as Mags hit the button. "I'm sorry for calling about the dog. Boone said—"

"Boone?" Couldn't be, thought Mags. "… Craig Boone?" she pressed anyway.

"Uh." A beat. "Yeah?"

Mags tried to fit together how _kid_ and _Boone_ and _asset_ _enough to be given an emergency radio_ squared with _chickenshit in the face of smelly dogs_ and came up with nothing. "Do you have an emergency, ma'am?" Hernandez stopped in the hallway and gestured at the radio with an unmistakable _what the fuck?_ motion.

"No," the kid said, all tinny sunshine and disregard for protocol. "The dog went away."

"That's good to hear, ma'am," Mags forced out, and Hernandez' face lit up.

"And Boone said I should apologize for wasting your time, so, uh. Sorry."

"He's a smart man," said Mags as neutrally as she could.

"M'name's Parker," said the kid cheerily, "what's yours?" and Hernandez looked like fucking Christmas had come early as Mags hung up again.

.. .. ..

There were worse jobs than riding a comm desk while her back healed up. Push buttons and talk-any idiot could do that, which was probably why Comm was full of idiots. Even Comm felt the squeeze when more bodies were needed, though. And so Michaels and Hernandez and Pullman got shuffled out and everybody's hours went long, and Mags had to carry the damn emergency radio clipped to her belt.

Now and then it crackled and hissed in the middle of the night like the kid had her finger on the button, but every time Mags glared at it the thing went quiet.

Until one time, right before sunrise, the radio popped and a clatter like a crateful of forks thrown down a steel staircase rattled across the line. A loose drunk laugh came through the speaker and the kid slurred, "NCR lady, you know how to work a can opener?" But before Mags could tell her to fuck off she heard a muffled heartfelt, "_Shit_," and the connection died again.

.. .. ..

By the time the next call came the picture had only gotten stranger. Scuttlebutt said the Parker kid was doing more for the NCR in her spare time than the brass was doing on the daily, though Mags didn't see how the fuck that could be true. She was supposed to be some kind of hotshot courier—_the_ Courier, they called her—shot twice in the head and spat out the bullets and straight-up refused to die. And afraid of dogs, Mags added silently to every bit of news about the kid that came her way. Fixed up Helios One and afraid of dogs. Got Morales' body back and afraid of dogs.

Took out those Fiends and couldn't work a fucking can opener. It was enough to make her shake her head, sometimes.

Three in the morning and the radio crackled, and Mags groaned into the springs of her mattress and fumbled for the receiver on the floor. "You had better be fucking dying," she growled into the handset with her eyes pressed closed.

For a second there was no answer. "I think," came the voice through the speaker, even higher and fainter than usual. "I might be?"

The kid coughed, weak and liquid, and full consciousness hit Mags like a wall of cold iron. "Where are you?" She tucked the receiver between her cheek and shoulder as she grabbed for her boots, already moving for the door.

.. .. ..

The NCR had a problem with having too much space to cover and too few bodies to cover it, Mags decided. And not only in general, but in painful specifics. Too few bodies to work the comm desk, too few bodies at the gate, too few to call in to help because everyone was already covering the spaces where three other people ought to be.

Which is how she had ended up poking through the El Rey Motel before sunrise, sidearm drawn and back pulling like hell as she climbed the stairs. It all looked good on paper, at least. Extraction of a valuable NCR asset from unsecured territory. No resources reported used. No casualties.

It sounded a hell of a lot better than _I went out alone at the ass-crack of dawn to pull a bleeding kid out of a building we should have burned down a hundred years ago, and she puked on me twice on the way back in._

After the kid got out of surgery she looked worse, not better, sickly against the blue smock they'd stuck her in. Her eyes drifted beneath her lids as Mags watched the minute hand of the clock tick in circles. She ought to get down to the mess—she had duty in four hours, and hadn't eaten since yesterday—but the kid stirred and opened her eyes, and smiled the most idiotic smile Mags had ever seen. "NCR lady," she crooned, flying high on the good drugs. "You came for me."

"It's an emergency radio," Mags reminded her, tired to her bones. "You had an emergency."

The kid reached out and patted and missed, mostly, until her knuckles grazed Mags' knee. "You're even prettier than I thought you'd be."

Mags caught hold of the hand petting her knee and returned it to the kid's side. "Don't be a dumbass," she said, almost kindly, and when the kid's face crumpled she added, "And it's Mags."

"Mags," the kid echoed, and smiled, for some reason.

Hernandez came by later on his crutches. Since he wasn't in too much pain Mags didn't feel guilty for being glad that he'd get stuck on Comm again, and she listened when he recounted two months' field chatter she hadn't heard yet. Before he left he jerked his chin at the recovery bed. "That's not your smelly dog girl, is it?"

The kid's mouth had fallen open in sleep, her chubby cheeks slack, and for a second she looked as dead as she had when Mags had found her on the floor of that roachhole. "Her name's Parker," she told Hernandez, and slunk off in search of a shower.

.. .. ..

After Parker scampered off again a steady stream of packages came to the Comm office, all more duct tape than box and all for Mags: prickly pear and mutfruit, bottles of wine padded with crumpled earnings reports, stacks of magazines to thumb through as the afternoons leaked by slow as melting tar.

_It's not much_, Parker wrote nearly every time.

A couple of times Mags reached for the radio after a new box came. To say thank you, or to say _you don't have to do this_, or to say… she wasn't sure. Her thumb hovered over the button until she gave up and clipped the radio back to her side.

The radio crackled a short, quiet burst of static around the same time every evening, about the time the stretch of her shift began to feel something like eternal. _Still here_, the kid said without a word. Mags hit the button and let the static crackle back for a second. _Still here, too._

And then the radio went dead for more than a month. Stupid to worry over it, she told herself even as she checked and rechecked the batteries. It was an emergency radio. No call, no emergency, no reason to worry. But the days slogged by and the breathless heat of late spring flattened beneath the brutal weight of the Mojave in full summer, and at night Mags lay in the dark in a pool of her own sweat with her stomach in knots.

A week after she'd written the kid off for dead the radio crackled to life again. "Mags? You there?"

She pulled the radio off her belt so fast she fumbled it and it hit the tile with a _crack_. "Where the fuck have you been?" she demanded when she got it to her ear, and the kid had the audacity to laugh.

"Sierra Madre," said Parker, which meant fuck-all to Mags. "I'm sending you a present."

"You sound tired," said Mags, gripping the handset hard.

"Yeah." Parker's laugh blew across the receiver. "Don't you want to know what it is?"

Not really. "Sure," she said anyway to keep her on the line.

"You have to call me when you get it, okay? It's a dress." When Mags didn't answer, Parker pressed, "A pretty dress."

"Just what I fucking needed," Mags said, and Parker only laughed.

.. .. ..

_Still here_, the static crackled that night.

_Still here, too._

.. .. ..

But between one thing and another the package didn't make it, and the misery of the desert summer ebbed to the dry tepid nastiness of autumn. More bodies poured through McCarran, funneled out to the teeth of the desert, to the towns, and more and more, to the Dam.

Across the water squatted the Legion, swelling by the day. The fight that was coming would have to come soon, and Mags had a sinking feeling she knew who'd be at the head of it. _You can't_, she wanted to tell the Colonel when Parker was sent to the Dam, _she doesn't know how to use a fucking can opener!_

But there was no more time. Riding the Comm desk while combat updates came through was a nightmare but at least Hernandez was in there to help juggle. The flurry of messages crackled in frantic—an assassination attempt, the President alive, the words hard to hear over the rain of gunfire—and Mags passed on messages until her voice went raw.

As the melee ran down and the losses started pouring in she pulled the desk drawer open to snag the extra canteen and found a package instead, battered and forgotten, with _for Mags_ written on the top. Beneath the duct tape and cardboard was a dress, a pretty dress, silky and black and useless as tits on a bull. Tucked into the folds of fabric was an honest-to-god rope of pearls and a note in Parker's curly script: _for when I take you dancing! _with a smiley face at the end.

Mags stared at the smiley face until her eyes stung. When she snapped out of it Hernandez was watching, silent. She swallowed the knot from her throat. "Get me the latest word on the Courier," she ordered, taut as wire, and he nodded and spoke into his headset as she reached for the emergency radio.


End file.
